Ronda Rousey was a master at armbars.
The inauguralUFC Women's Bantamweight Champion was able to rise through the MMA ranks largely due to her trademark move.
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'Rowdy's' background as anOlympic judoka enabled her to perfect the painful technique, which involves trapping her victim's arm between her own legs and torquing their elbow unnaturally.
Back in 2012, before her UFC success when she was Strikeforce bantamweight champion, Rousey described in gruesome detail what it was like to break someone's arm.
"I don't think it's satisfying," she said.
"It kind of grosses me out. I tell everybody, it kind of feels like tearing apart a turkey with a crotch. It really does. It's gross. When you're trying to get a turkey thing off and you feel all the cartilage and the tendons and the bones coming off, when you're pulling it, it really is that exact feeling. It's gross. But that's the way it is. They'd try to do the exact same thing to me. I've felt it being done to my own arms."
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The former Baddest Woman On The Planet won her first eight professional MMA bouts via armbar.
One of those victories came in 2011, when she dislocated Julia Budd's elbow at Strikeforce Challengers.
“I totally felt it go out. The referee said I couldn’t talk to her. So, I was like, ‘Alright, that’s totally out,'” she said at the time. “I flipped her over and I was like, ‘Ew!’ I didn’t want to take my arm and point at it but I was like, ‘Uh, somebody stop this please.'”
In March 2012, Rousey brutally dislocated Miesha Tate's elbow when she won the Strikforce 135-pound title.
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A year later, she defended her batamweight crown against Liz Carmouche at UFC 157 in the first-everwomen's fightin UFC history.
In the headline bout, Ronda locked in the armbar that ended matters at 4:49 in Round 1.
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At the time, Rousey took issue with people saying she was solely reliant on her signature move.
“When people say that I’m a one trick pony and only have the one armbar, they don’t realize that I have so many setups to that armbar that I don’t even know them all – I’ll make them up on the fly,” she said.
“When you’re watching boxing and you see somebody knock someone out with a right hand every time, they’re not like, ‘Oh, they’re a one trick pony.’ No, they have a billion different setups for that right hand. And just because it ended with a right hand on the face, it doesn’t mean it’s the same thing every time.
"And just because so many people are unfamiliar with grappling and they just see the armbar ending the same, they assume the setup’s the same, but if you look back at all those fights, I’ve jumped into that armbar from many different positions. It ends the same way, but the setups are always different. So they can prepare for a certain setup, but I’m always gonna think of more."
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In total, Rousey had nine victories inside the octagon via armbar, the last of which came against Cat Zingano at UFC 184 in February 2015.
It was no surprise that by the time she moved over to the WWE she was still using the armbar as her finisher.
The irony of all this was that in February 2023 Rousey revealed that she'd fractured her radius (one of two bones in the forearm) at WWE’s house show in Rockford, Illinois.
At the time she explained that she was also dealing with pre-existing issues in her right knee, which she stated had no ACL or cartilage.
"It’s thanks to that ACL injury I spent an entire year focusing solely on newaza (ground techniques in judo) and became the best in the world in armbars and transitions (anyone who doubts me is welcome to try me)," she wrote on Instagram.
"Well, after thousands of dislocations (I thought not tapping out to armbars and tearing ligaments was cool in my teens) my elbow finally fractured simply by slapping the mat in Rockford, Illinois- right before Wrestlemania.
"The only thing saving these chicks now are the doctors not letting me compete. Well ladies, they can’t keep me away forever, I’m not moping, vengeance is coming."
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The former UFC queen has not competed inside a WWE ring since SummerSlam 2023, where she lost to longtime friend Shayna Baszler.
A WWE return seems unlikely at this point, with Rousey recently landing a massive new job with Netflix.
